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19 July 2011 early edition/transcript/Intro
Introduction VIDEO, MURDOCH ARRIVING KEITH OLBERMANN: Rupert Murdoch, arriving this morning at the Houses of Parliament in London – this morning our time; this afternoon theirs – not in triumph, but in chaos. Literal and figurative chaos. Literal enough that his car had to seek an alternate route to get him to his destination, because the car was, as you see blocked by tabloid reporters. Irony untold. Figurative chaos in the line outside the building in which he will testify in about fifteen minutes. A former staffer from his former newspaper News of the World in line saying to a reporter he was there to try to gain admission as a member of the audience so he could see the hair on the back of Rupert Murdoch's neck stand up while he was being grilled. VIDEO OLBERMANN: Good morning from New York. Seventeen days ago on the night of Saturday, July 2nd, Elisabeth Murdoch, the daughter of the man who has reshaped the media in three nations, hosted an elaborate party at their 22-bedroom mansion, Burford Priory. Miss Murdoch and her brother James continued their perpetual celebration of, and this is only slight hyperbole, their family's world domination. The guests ranged from the brother of the head of Britain's current opposition party, Labour, to former Murdoch editor Piers Morgan. If the conversation or the food or the alcohol were somehow insufficient, the Murdoch's guests were invited to drive a classic Jaguar around the estate's roads. One of those guests was seen in deep conversation with James Murdoch. She was Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of Murdoch's News International, perhaps the most powerful person in the company not named Murdoch, this side of Roger Ailes anyway. July 2nd. Then, within 24 hours, news broke. News of an almost forgotten scandal in which one or two rogue Murdoch employees years ago had listened in on the phone calls and voicemails of a couple of politicians, and of members of the British Royal Family, and of celebrities. The kind of people still considered fair game to be the victims of that kind of stuff, especially in that kind of country. Except it turned out that one of those victims was not an actor, nor a prince, nor a member of Parliament, but a twelve-year-old girl named Milly Dowler. And after she had disappeared and her family was desperately hoping for any evidence or hint that she was still alive, somebody working for the Murdoch's had hacked into her voicemails and not only listened to them, but had erased some of them so there'd be more voicemails to listen to later, giving the Dowler's the heartbreakingly false hope that she was not dead. She was dead. This morning, the world of Burford Priory no longer exists. This morning, the newspaper Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch ran, the News of the World, no longer exists. It's out of business. This morning, the pay-TV giant they and Rupert Murdoch planned to subsume, B-Sky-B, is no longer within their grasp, and they may yet wind up owning none of it. This morning, ten of their editors and employees have been arrested. This morning, one of their former reporters is dead, found yesterday in his home, after whistleblowing the whole thing, and police are investigating. This morning, two top men in Scotland Yard have resigned and ended their careers with the police. This morning, the Murdoch organization is under investigation by the American Department of Justice and the FBI. This morning, the former Prime Minister of England still accuses the Murdochs of stealing the medical records of his infant son, who had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. This morning, the current Prime Minister has turned on the Murdoch clan and cartel. Last October, he invited Rebekah Brooks to his birthday party; today the Prime Minister is not even in England, and yet there is still a chance his government could fall. This morning, Bloomberg News reports that the other owners of Murdoch's NewsCorp might be ready to fire him as chief executive officer and replace him with COO Chase Carey if today goes as badly as many think it will. Because, this morning, Rebekah Brooks is out of work and out on bail. This morning, Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch and the Emperor Palpatine of the outfit, Rupert Murdoch – the untouchable lord of British media and Australian media and, to a degree, American media for four decades – they are all to testify to a committee of the British Parliament. The questions will not be friendly. In England, as in this country, there is blood in the water, and the sharks are suddenly bipartisan. Rupert and James Murdoch are to testify to the Parliamentary Committee on Culture, Media and Sport at Portcullis House, a large facility just to the left in that famous image of Big Ben and Britain's Houses of Parliament in London. They should begin at 2:30 local time, 9:30 here in the East Cost of the U.S. The Murdochs are scheduled to testify for an hour, then at 10:30 Eastern, Rebekah Brooks, the ousted and arrested, is scheduled for an hour more of testimony. Whether they stick to those schedules we can't say for sure. We can tell you we will bring all of it to you live, then have reaction at its conclusion; the full summary tonight on Countdown at 8:00pm Eastern, and a special two-hour recap of this testimony at 9:00pm Eastern this evening. I'm honored to be joined now by a man whose honesty in the middle of a similar festival of fraudulence in this country 38 and 39 years ago very greatly contributed to the preservation of our democracy. As a result, he knows all about ever-expanding scandals to say nothing of investigations and hearings. John Dean, Countdown Contributor, columnist, and author of such books as Conservatives Without Conscience and Worse Than Watergate. The Murdochs are in London; I'm in New York; John's in Los Angeles. Good morning, John. JOHN DEAN: Good morning, Keith. OLBERMANN: When we first spoke about this two weeks ago, you and Carl Bernstein, separately, early on in this event, compared this, with a right and a privilege that I think only the two of you, and maybe a few others, have, to the Watergate scandal of 1972, `73, `74. With the added information and the added events of the last two weeks, why is that comparison valid this morning? DEAN: Well, here we have a situation where two very powerful men condoned, if not encouraged, conduct within their organizations that's come back to haunt them. I don't think- there's no evidence Richard Nixon ever called for a break-in and bugging of the Democratic National Committee, but he certainly wanted the kind of information that was the only place they could get it. Here you have a situation where you had phone hacking. I don't think Mister Murdoch had any direct knowledge or instructions to go hack telephones and voicemail messages, but yet he created an atmosphere in which that was very much encouraged, and he knew that his editors and his reporters could only get the kind of stories they were getting by using those kind of techniques. So you have the morality or the conduct of the newsroom, and, in my instance, the White House set by the man at the top. Now that's come back to haunt, as it did with Nixon, Mister Murdoch. There's very little question, Keith, for anybody who looks at these facts and the way they've unrolled, that Mister Murdoch and his people have not been exactly forthcoming. You don't put out press releases on these kinds of activity, so they've been covered up, and that's what this Committee is looking at. They've been on these issues for many years. They've been wanting to understand it: the fact that two members of the News of the World – a private investigator and a reporter, a royal reporter –were caught using this kind of information, were indicted and tried and went to jail for that conduct, has been long known. That was resolved in 2007. So there're more questions that keep coming up because this conduct has never really been fully addressed – who knew what and when – and they're going to be one of the subjects they explore today. And it has great implications for the future of this operation. So I do have some expertise with cover-ups, and it'll be interesting to see how this one unfolds in the public forum it's going to be in today. OLBERMANN: There's something extraordinarily different about this one, though, as I think back on what I know of Watergate, which is, of course, a drop in the bucket compared to what you do. But there were two hearings today, one of which is just concluding in front of a separate committee of the House of Commons in London, at which the exiting head of Scotland Yard has just revealed that ten of the 45 press officers in his department used to work for News International, the European branch of Murdoch's NewsCorp organization. And, to some degree, this underscores this added dimension, this cross-pollinization. The police had hired this man Neil Wallis to do P.R. He had been at the newspapers while he was working for the police. While they were investigating phone-hacking, he was apparently reporting back to the NewsCorp organization about what was going on there. Meantime, the then head of the opposition party, now the Prime Minister, Mister Cameron, had hired Andy Coulson to run P.R. for him. He had been the editor at the News of the World while phone-hacking was going on. It is this incestuousness of the thing between the politicians, between the police, between the media, that seems to turn this into three-dimensional chess. DEAN: Well, that's true. There is certainly much more of that relationship in the U.K. then there was in Watergate or there is in the United States. There is some of that more today than there was back during the Nixon years. You did used to have former media men come in and become press secretaries to the President. That isn't very common; it wasn't common during the Nixon Administration. During Eisenhower's and Johnson's Presidency, you had pretty seasoned men working as press secretaries. And to the contrary, you had an adversarial relationship between the Nixon White House and the media. Chuck Coulson –our Mister Coulson in our issue – was at war with the television networks, constantly trying to shape the news in a more favorable way to Mister Nixon. Here, there's much more cross-pollinization. It's much cozier, and I think that's one of the issues, based on the witnesses and based on the background of this Committee that's holding this hearing, it's very concerned about. They think this is a little troublesome that these relationships are as close as they are. They don't check each other as they were once designed, and hopefully the system should help them do. Rather, they're all in there together on the same issues with the same interest. OLBERMANN: John, stand by. I'm going to come back to you, but I wanted to give the people who are going to watch this an idea of who we're talking to and talking about today, the members of the Committee. Let me give you some procedural notes. As I mentioned, there's already been another Parliamentary hearing this morning. The Home Affairs Committee met and heard testimony from the just-resigned head of Scotland Yard, Sir Paul Stephenson, and the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, John Yates, and Dick Fedorcio, director of public affairs for the Metropolitan Police. We will be watching a second Committee, that is the CSM:, the Committee on Culture, Sport and Media. It is chaired by John Whittingdale, who is a conservative. He was in the same role, Chairman, when this Committee was previously assured that there was nothing in the way of an endemic problem here: no real scandal here, just a rogue or rogues within Murdoch's organization. Thus, he has been lied to. But, like everybody else in this saga, Mister Whittingdale has a connection. He was a long-time friend of Les Hinton, fifty years a right-hand man to Rupert Murdoch, and Hinton just Friday resigned as the head of Murdoch's Wall Street Journal operations here in the U.S. Another conservative: Dr. Therese Coffey, member for Suffolk Coastal. Her degree is in chemistry and her milestone here, or millstone perhaps: two weeks ago tomorrow in Parliament, she defended Rebekah Brooks. Said there was a, quote, "witchhunt" developing against Brooks; that Brooks was the victim here. Also from the conservative party: Damian Collins, the member for Folkestone and Hythe. He's only been in Parliament fourteen months, only on the Committee for a year, considered one of the fifty people to watch in British politics, an assessment made in 2007. Philip Davies is the conservative member for Shipley. Author of the so-called Campaign Against Political Correctness, he's against a lot more than that. He advocates that he nation scrap the Human Rights Act for foreign nationals and chuck them out of the country, and he has called for an increase in the prison population. Rounding out the conservatives on the panel: Louise Mensch, better known as the writer Louise Daphne Bagshawe, who composed fourteen novels for young women. Inspired as a girl by Margaret Thatcher, she was briefly a member of Labour after Tony Blair's ascent to the Premiership, and then she returned to the conservatives. And her husband is the manager for the bands the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica. From the opposition: Paul Farrelly, a member of the Committee, the Labour member for Newcastle-under-Lyme. Members of this Committee are not, in fact, selected for their backstories despite the evidence you've heard so far, but of course Mister Farrelly has his. Last November, he got into a fight in the sports and social club of the Houses of Parliament on karaoke night. Alan Keen of Labour represents Feltham and Heston, and has so for nineteen years. In a not-unheard-of development in Parliament, his wife is also a member of the House. Jim Sheridan, member for Paisley & Renfrewshire North lives up to his Party's name: worked in the shipyards from 1970 to 1978. He's the only member of this group that has an actual, verifiable media connection. He was a printer for the Paisley Daily Express in Scotland. Tom Watson of Labour represents the wonderfully-named constituency of West Bromwich East. Not only did he lead Parliamentary efforts to ban sales of the works of the musician Gary Glitter after his sexual offense convictions, but in 2006, he called on Prime Minister Tony Blair of his own party to resign. He has also called out Glenn Beck. The phone-hacking saga is right up his alley: he's been a leader in Parliament on digital and online information issues. Completing the Committee on Culture, Media and Sport: Adrian Sanders of the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats are in a coalition with the conservatives and run the government today. He represents Torbay and was perhaps the only member of Parliament to get a full bill of health from those investigating last year's big British scandal, in which nearly all the members had padded their expense accounts, some by a few bob and others by tens of thousands of pounds. Those are the names and the politicians you will see questioning the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks. It's coming up on 9:30 Eastern time, 2:30 in London, and as of yet, the feed from the Houses of Parliament has yet to indicate to us that the interrogation, if you will, of the Murdochs has begun or is about to begin. We will go to it, obviously, when it does. In the interim, let me go back to John Dean in Los Angeles. John, you said last night on Countdown that you thought this was early in the scandal. Elaborate on that if you will. DEAN: Well, what's happened is this has been a fairly successful cover-up, Keith. The events that really brought it to the public attention were in 2007 when two members of the News of the World were arrested and prosecuted for hacking the Royals' voicemails. At that point, they said, "well, these are just two bad apples, nobody else is involved," and it wasn't until 2009 when the Guardian broke a pretty major story indicating that indeed this was much wider, that there was much more of this activity than had been ever reported to this Committee or anybody else. And it's that- from there on it started to unravel. The Murdoch people claim that was just all hogwash when the Guardian made that attack, but it's proved to be very accurate. And they indeed had signs that there had been large settlements with other people who had been hacked. Celebrity-types: a football star – soccer star – in the U.K., some of his people. So these large settlements had a distinct scent of hush-money. In other words, "we'll pay you a lot to settle your litigation." It's a very clever hush-money approach because it goes through lawyers processing it and nice contracts written up, agreements not to testify, agreements not to talk about any of this. And then large sums of money paid. Extraordinary sums of money paid for these things. And they're still being paid, but not with the same silence. So all this has just been fodder for this Committee and for others. The police are simultaneously investigating this. I think one of the issues that'll come up with some of these witnesses is whether they will try to defer to the police investigation rather than add anything themselves. They will sort of stonewall it. They don't have the equivalent of the Fifth Amendment. They do have a practice over there that they don't jeopardize the rights of people, but these Committees can push pretty hard. There have been instances where witnesses have come before these Committees and totally stonewalled. We have a media-related event where that happened, where the Maxwell brothers – they were sons of Robert Maxwell, the media baron – had apparently filched a great deal of money from the pension plans of one of the other newspapers there and run off with it, and no one could find out where all these millions of pension dollars had gone to. And the Maxwell brothers came in front of a related Committee of Parliament and totally stonewalled it. They wouldn't answer. They were held in contempt. They still didn’t' answer. They were then charged fraud, had a very complex trial, no one really ever got their hands on the money, and the case was so difficult in front of the jury that they pretty much got away with their fraud. They were never convicted. So there's a lot of open-ended questions about the effectiveness of Parliamentary Committees in pressing people for information. We have the same problem here in this country with Congressional Committees, where they're never quite sure how far to push, how hard to push. We have no hint at this point as to the witnesses appearing today – who might cooperate, who might not. A smart move would actually be to give an appearance of cooperation. We've got a public company where shareholders are watching very closely today what happens to this testimony, and it's going to affect the price of this company. OLBERMANN: Yeah, and as we heard last night, Michael Wolff suggested there might be some sort of major diversion. That he wouldn't be surprised to see Murdoch come out and announce at the hearing that perhaps his son was leaving the company, or they would be selling off all of their newspapers. Overnight there was a story from Bloomberg News that they're ready to fire Murdoch perhaps – the other owners of the company – squeeze him out and put the COO with the huge Rollie Fingers-style mustache, Chase Carey, in charge. There's another thing about testimony, one of the reasons that the Murdoch testimony has not yet begun, John, is, we're advised from London, that the Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee continues to hear testimony, and here we've seen as we're about to join that and give you a taste of that. Sir Paul Stephenson was the head of Scotland Yard who bailed out the other day, did something that's fairly common in all kinds of investigations. He answered many questions this morning whether or not he could possible answer it or he needed to defer it to John Yates, the assistant commissioner, who's testifying now. We're told that Rupert Murdoch is taking the chair. LIVE FEED OLBERMANN: Let's take you now to London as the Committee on Culture, Sport and Media beginning to hear the testimony of Rupert Murdoch.